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From what we've been told, we'll be shipping our current drives, and our next gen drives. It probably won't be until 2008 until you see any kind of "merge" of technology/ideas between the two companies.

Actually, none of the people I know had any idea this was coming. We all had been guessing we were going to get purchased sometime (because there are always rumors about that kind of thing when your company can't seem to turn a profit). I'd say one of the reasons why a lot of people were leaving was just because of our situation overall. We just don't have enough resources to get everything done right, and I think a lot of people were fed up with it. You have to spend money to make money, but the company wasn't able to do that.
Didn't really have much to do with Longmont vs. Shrewsbury or anything. We are basically 2 autonomous groups that don't really work together much anyway. The "next gen" stuff was mostly based off of Shrewsbury's design - but I don't believe there were any "hard feelings" over that. There was definitely a lot elements of both sites to be present in it (all 3 actually - there was some Milpitas technology in there as well).
Your news source found out sooner than the rest of us did... We didn't find out till Wednesday morning. Our stock purchase program ended on Monday, and I know a lot of people that sold all of their shares on Tuesday night and missed out on the big price bump we got.

I'm a firmware lead at Maxtor in Longmont, CO - and this scares me a good bit in terms of my employment. I don't really see much of a reason for Seagate to hold onto most of our engineering staff at Maxtor - there isn't much point in redundancy.
The sentinment around the firmware side of Colorado was more or less what pandabear said - we are mostly thinking that they are going to axe most of us, and take the principle engineers.
We'll see what the future brings. Here's hoping that all of us that don't manage to stay on with Seagate are able to find good jobs elsewhere...
I'd like to hear MaxtorSCSI's take on this as well. I know he's out in Shrewsbury and I'd like to hear what vibes everyone out there is getting.

There are only 2 controllers right now that I am sure that supports NCQ, being the ICH6 on the new Intel chipset boards, and the Silicon Image 3124. I work in firmware at Maxtor, and the only controllers that we can run our NCQ tests on are the ICH6 and 3124. Now, the Highpoint 1829X I believe supports it as well, but we don't have drivers in our testing environment quite yet that support it (working on it at the moment), so I can't confirm that.
Since Maxtor doesn't have any SATA drives that support the old ATA TCQ, I'm not sure which controllers support that, so I guess I can't answer anything in regards to the original question.
Basically, the big difference between TCQ and NCQ as I understand it, is who is managing the DMA queues, etc. In the old TCQ, the host had to manage all aspects of the command, whereas with NCQ, the host sends the command to the SATA controller, and the controller sorts everything out and manages the entire process itself. Thats where the speed bump comes in with NCQ over TCQ, apparently, in that the controller manages all aspects of the command while the host doesn't have to worry about it, which creates less overhead for the host.
I don't know if this answers anyone's questions at all, but I hope it was at least useful information.

Well, I fixed it (before I saw your replies). Just bit the bullet and reinstalled without any ATA drives connected. Seems to work fine now though.
What was really strange though, was that there was no boot.ini on my SCSI drive before. Definitely makes sense as to why I couldn't boot with both of them connected though. Not going to post the boot.ini contents since the problem is resolved now. It has one on the SCSI disk, which works fine for all configurations, so thats good enough for me.
Thanks for the links too, btw. If anyone else is curious, I found these 2 to also be a lot of help concerning the boot process:
Inside the boot process Part 1
Inside the boot process Part 2

Ok, to add another problem to the mix....
With both of these ATA drives hooked up, my computer will not boot into windows. It says that there is something wrong with my hardware configuration and that I should check my boot order.
Unhook the new ATA drive, boots fine.
I was also looking at the boot.ini file... and shouldn't there be some kind of like scsi(0) switch in there since I am trying to boot off of a scsi device?

Ok, I lied. When I set windows to show hidden files, it didn't show any. However, I got to it from the command line and changed the attributes so it wasn't hidden anymore. So, I put that on one of my other disks, and I'll try copying it to my new ATA drive, and seeing how that works.

Ok, having a bit of a problem here. I have windows installed on my SCSI drive. When I installed it, it wanted to write something to an ATA drive I had connected as well, so I said "OK" and let it do it's thing. Everything worked fine, etc.
Now, this ATA drive I had is incredibly old, so I wanted to replace it. I bought a new ATA drive, to replace that one. I swapped drives out, but now Windows won't boot without that old ATA drive connected.
I tried installing Windows again onto my SCSI drive (to a different folder) with the new ATA drive connected, but that will only allow me to boot from this new install, not the one that I actually want to use.
Any ideas as to what I can do without installing over my old Windows install (I would like to keep it intact, if at all possible...)

Well, according to Maxtor's 2002 Annual Report, we spent 10% of our revenue on R&D (revenue in 2002 was $3.8 billion), so that puts R&D costs at about $380 million or so.
I'm trying to find out what it was for last year, but I can't find anything at the moment. Maybe I'll have to talk to HR later today or something. I'll let you know if I find anything out though.